Publishers Oppose Bill on Scholarly Open Access

Submitted by Steve Kolowich on March 6, 2012 - 3:00am

A group of 81 scholarly journal publishers on Monday came out against[1] the latest iteration of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) -- a bill that would require federal research grantees to make their resulting academic papers freely available to the public no more than six months after publication in a scholarly journal. The bill, introduced last month in both the House[2] and the Senate[2], is the third iteration of FRPAA to be introduced since 2006; two previous versions failed to make it to a vote.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) sent letters to prominent legislators in both[3]chambers[4] criticizing the bill for seeking to apply a “one-size-fits-all” deadline of six months before publishers, many of which charge for access to articles, must compete with a free version in a government database. In many disciplines, publishers retain the exclusive right to sell access to the peer-reviewed article for “several years before costs are recovered,” according to the AAP. Among the 81 signatories to the letters was Elsevier, a major journal publisher that last month withdrew its support[5] for (and effectively nixed) the Research Works Act -- a bill that would have preemptively killed FRPAA -- after facing a boycott from frustrated scholars.

The American Anthropological Association, which caught flak[6] last month from some of its members after its executive director wrote a note to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy criticizing public access mandates, did not sign on to either letter.